


Angela and Gus's Day Out

by petalprose



Category: Carole & Tuesday (Anime)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Breaking and Entering, Gen, Humor, Post-Canon, Tigers, Touring, Zoo, bad disguises, for the Carole & Tuesday Voices From Mars Fanzine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:21:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29115948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petalprose/pseuds/petalprose
Summary: It starts with an innocuous question. Gus leans back in his chair in the aftermath of the group’s late breakfast, grins with his teeth, and says, “How would you girls like to meet a famous songwriter?”Angela doesn’t think anything is suspicious with the question; she’d heard Carole and Tuesday were getting started on a new album after getting a song idea while on the tour, but were having trouble coming up with lyrics. She assumes Gus is trying to lend the pair a hand by offering them some outside expertise. But Carole and Tuesday both go almost comically pale, and Angela’s curiosity is piqued at the vehemence of their refusals.A day trip with Gus later, finding herself fretting with White Tigers at her back and Gus knocked out on the ground following a botched negotiation with an irate zookeeper, Angela can understand the refusal.
Relationships: Angela Carpenter & Gus (Carole & Tuesday)
Kudos: 6
Collections: cross's portfolio





	Angela and Gus's Day Out

If you asked Angela, she would say: all I did was follow directions. I was not told much about this and, in fact, was less informed about the catastrophe than a low-budget-movie villain’s henchman, so legally I cannot be prosecuted. I don’t know where in the law it says that, but it has to, because I—

If you asked Gus, he would say: I did not commit a crime, I and my accompli—companion are not criminals, we are in this situation due to an honest mistake made with no malicious intent, and we are both legally entitled to a lawyer—

In any case, Angela and Gus are both running for their lives, and as she gasps for breath and keeps her eyes in front of her (horrifyingly, she has learned that Gus can run faster than her) and hears the terrible, menacing growls of exotic fauna hot on their trail, Angela takes a moment in between one terrified step and the next reflecting on just how exactly she had gotten herself into such a perilous position.

* * *

It starts with an innocuous question. Gus leans back in his chair in the aftermath of the group’s late breakfast, grins with his teeth, and says, “How would you girls like to meet a famous songwriter?”

Angela doesn’t think anything is suspicious with the question; she’d heard Carole and Tuesday were getting started on a new album after getting a song idea while on the tour, but were having trouble coming up with lyrics. She assumes Gus is trying to lend the pair a hand by offering them some outside expertise. But Carole and Tuesday both go almost comically pale, and Angela’s curiosity is piqued at the vehemence of their refusals.

“No, thank you,” says Tuesday, quickly, and makes an aborted move that looks to Angela as though she’d started to rise out of her chair but thought better of it. “I think we can pass on the wisdom this time around.”

“I don’t want to get axed on _tour!_ ” Carole wails, but Angela is still caught on Tuesday’s reaction, because straightforwardness from Carole, Angela has seen before—but passive-aggression is a new look on Tuesday, and Angela is morbidly curious.

“Who is it?” Angela asks, and blinks, leaning back at the force of the grin Gus levels on her.

“Why, _Angela,_ I’m glad you asked! Allow me to bestow upon you the name of one of Earth’s most prolific songwriters: Aurelia St. Claire!”

The name registers as faintly familiar to Angela. “St. Claire… They wrote some advertising jingles, didn’t they?”

At that, Gus seems to deflate. Angela feels that was a bit of an overreaction, but he quickly recovers. “Correct, though that was something they picked up later on in their career, and they were very successful at that, too!” he adds, with an almost spiteful little side-glance at Carole and Tuesday.

“So they’re in the area?” Angela asks.

They are, according to Gus’s sources. Judging by the look on Carole and Tuesday’s faces, Angela guesses that said sources are less than trustworthy, but she’s committed herself to this. And she’s bored. They all have a good two days in between having to move from tour stop to tour stop—Angela had needed to request as much of a breather, and Carole and Tuesday only benefited from it, being new to the scene themselves.

Angela effectively signs herself up for giving up a full day of rest to a scavenger hunt she’s not sure will prove fruitful. Gus is delighted by her offer to help him find St. Claire, and it’s enough of a win for him that he stops needling Carole and Tuesday about it.

They spend a brief ten minutes at the hotel restaurant ‘brainstorming’ as to how to begin their search (really, it was Gus doing a quick search on his phone and Angela asking questions like “If their location isn’t public, isn’t it a breach of privacy?” “No, it’s merely a challenge!” and, to Carole and Tuesday: “How have you not gotten yourselves arrested yet?” “Sheer force of will.”). Another hour later, Angela and Gus are walking towards the nearby bus stop.

Gus had insisted that taking any of the vehicles associated with them would draw unnecessary attention, and Angela conceded that he was probably right. They’d had an absolutely unbelievable turnout at the concert the evening prior, with every space filled within an hour of ticket sales going up and even more people simply sitting as close to the venue as they could get just to be able to hear the music. They’re bound to be recognized.

So, instead of taking one of their cars, Angela and Gus elected to take public transport. They also chose to wear disguises that should be enough to dissuade any fans from coming close: sunglasses and a large scarf for Angela, on top of a dark purple suit she’s sure she hasn’t worn in public before. She also decides to leave her hair down; her hairstyle has become a bit of a fashion trend, and would be conspicuous.

Gus is just in a camo-print parka on top of his regular clothes. She is not sure how this will disguise him.

They get on a bus, intending to get off at the Plaza. It’s crowded. There are mysterious smells Angela does not want to know the origin of. She takes a seat, taking care not to brush up against anyone or wrinkle her suit.

“So Aurelia St. Clair lives in Evon City,” she says. “Do you have any idea what street? A workplace? A favourite cafe?”

“Not a clue.” Gus is fiddling with his phone. There aren’t any other seats available, so he’s standing, free hand holding on to one of the handles hanging from the ceiling. “That’s what I’m working on right now.”

“Try _Aurelia St. Claire plus Evon City,”_ advises Angela, after leaning over for a peek at his phone screen.

“I know what a Boolean search is,” says Gus, deeply offended.

“A _what?_ ”

They spend the rest of the bus ride like this, going back and forth over search terms. When they arrive at the Evon City Plaza, they’ve narrowed it down to two possible locations: an area Gus thinks is a private zoo, and a restaurant that serves Earth cuisine. Both lie in opposite directions from their starting point of the Plaza.

“We’re not investigating on our own,” says Gus, with a firmness that surprises Angela when she suggests they split up. He catches on to his own tone, and hastily adds, “The town’s big enough that we could both get lost.”

 _I’m big enough that I know not to get lost,_ thinks Angela, an immediate, knee-jerk reaction, and summarily ignores that thought in favour of deciding which place to investigate first.

To begin, they decide on walking the three blocks to the restaurant, being about the time of day when the lunch rush begins. “It’s the most likely time we’ll find them,” Gus says.

Angela just thinks he wants to stop there for the food. Not that she can blame him; she wants to try out the advertised Earth delicacies herself.

When they arrive, there isn’t any sign of the mysterious songwriter. They take a seat at a table that allows them to observe both the inside of the restaurant as well as outside through its windows. Angela thinks, as a waiter comes by to nervously take their orders, that she and Gus must either look like Mob members, tackily-dressed rich people, or horribly-disguised food critics.

Just for fun, she orders the most expensive item she can find on a quick read-through of the menu, and watches as the waiter blanches. It’s grilled lobster, with a litany of suggested toppings and dressings and other ornaments, guaranteed to have come from the shores of Earth; not that it makes any difference to Angela, who has never had lobster before.

She decides she can live without it. She also continues to order off the menu, the last remaining shred of guilt over her frivolous spending fading as she listens to Gus do the same.

The lunch rush ends with still no sign of St. Claire. Angela saves a few photos of the songwriter Gus texts to her, scrutinizing every person she sees that even vaguely matches the photos. The timestamp on one of them confirms it was taken before Angela was b—before—confirms it was taken a couple decades prior. Aurelia St. Claire had a healthy glow to their brown skin in the photos, their black hair in what Gus calls _space braids_ on either side of their head. They were from somewhere called the Philippines, Gus tells Angela, some time into the second course of their meal. The electric-blue of their eyes were courtesy of contact lenses, and their songs were often based on their love of the stars. They had planned to become an astrophysicist and began singing to save up money for University, but shifted their focus to songwriting after their words drew more attention than their voice.

“I don’t see how this information is going to help us find them,” says Angela.

Gus scoffs, a performative, dismissive _bah!_ “You kids these days have no appreciation for history.” He stops with the exposition, though, and resumes his inhalation of the shrimp.

Angela finds that she is enjoying herself. She and Gus have ordered just about the whole menu by the end of their stay—...ke out, and the restaurant staff are looking increasingly as though they don’t know whether to be thankful for their presence adding to their coffers, or resentful of the fact that they’ve essentially been loitering in one of the best tables of the house for a good four hours. Later in the day, the staff will receive the most pleasant shock when Angela posts all the pictures she takes of her meals on Instagram. At present, though, they are shooting table twelve’s oddly dressed pair nervous glances, wringing their collective hands, and fretting, not necessarily in that order.

Angela and Gus finally leave the restaurant at a quarter to four. They take a cab back to the Plaza despite the distance of three blocks. Angela had made sure she hadn’t eaten food at the same rate Gus had, but she still wants to ensure she’ll have enough energy to properly schmooze with whichever rich person owns the private zoo. They might even be St. Claire themself, which Angela feels is the more likely possibility.

She leans back on the bench they’d found to sit on and asks, “So this private zoo, does it need an entrance fee? Because I think I’ve just emptied out my wallet.” She hasn’t, but she’s certainly spent more than she would usually allow herself to.

“Not sure,” says Gus, already squinting at his phone. “There isn’t a website for it or anything. I just found it going through the city on Marsian Maps. Doesn’t look very big to me.”

“It’s about four in the afternoon,” Angela says, after checking her phone. “We should probably get a move on if we want to get there in time before it closes.”

The private zoo is more than a few blocks away, on a street located downtown. They hail another cab to get there, Gus too impatient to wait for the bus and Angela unwilling to subject herself to any more mysterious odors. When they arrive, Angela thinks that she probably should have checked out the street view for the place before following Gus’s lead. The gates are forbidding and imposing, and it looks more like a mansion than a private zoo. But who knows, maybe they’ll finally be able to end their search here. It’s not really any skin off Angela’s back if they don’t find St. Claire, anyway.

Their current issue is finding a way in, with no way to contact the staff of the establishment. They quickly find a solution, however.

They break in.

Well! Angela would really prefer not to refer to what they do to get inside as _breaking and entering_ , but at its core, it is breaking and entering.

It is not Angela’s proudest moment. She turns to ask Gus how he thinks they should get in and baulks, the man already halfway up the gate. “What are you doing!” she barks, caught off guard. “You’re going to get us caught!” Distantly, she realizes that she is already talking like they are doing something illegal. Presently, she shoves that thought to the back of her mind, in the wake of the PR disaster unfolding before her.

Appallingly, Gus _shushes her._ “You’re going to get us caught with your shouting,” he spits back, _spits_ being accurate, hauling himself up and over the gate clearly taking more effort than he’d anticipated. The spikes along the top certainly don’t seem to be helping him any.

Angela pushes her novelty tabby cat cat-eye sunglasses higher up her head, dragging her hands down her face. She is, to put it lightly, distressed. This is not what she had planned when she left with Gus. This is, in fact, less than ideal.

But Gus is already over the gate and jumping down, hands on his knees as he catches his breath.

Angela grabs the bars of the gates, leans in close, and hisses, “If we get arrested for this, I’m going to incriminate you for everything.”

Then she climbs up and over the gate.

“Okay,” she says to herself, consciously aware that she is beginning to catastrophize— _we’re going to get caught, the owner is going to chase us out or call the police and then my career will be over, the tabloids ate Ertegun up and spat him back out and they’ll do the same thing to me—_ but she takes a deep breath, clenches her fists, and opens them again when she exhales. She’ll worry later. Right now Gus is already blabbering on about which enclosure they should visit.

“Investigate,” Angela corrects him. She impresses herself with the level of restraint she shows in not gritting her teeth.

“Investigate, sure,” says Gus, surveying their surroundings. He begins to amble off in a direction and after a brief moment spent gathering her patience Angela follows. “I think I hear monkeys this way, let’s go!”

Once they reach the enclosure it becomes apparent to them that the monkeys Gus had heard were not monkeys and were, in fact, tigers. **WHITE TIGERS** _,_ Angela reads off the plaque, as Gus begins hassling the wildcats. (She preemptively claims no responsibility whatsoever if he gets his face clawed off.) **PIGMENTATION VARIANT OF THE BENGAL TIGER** _._

Above the description are two names which Angela assumes are for each of the two tigers. _Ada_ and _Lovelace._ She reports as much to Gus.

“The mathematician?” he mutters, peering at the plaque, before turning back to address the cats. He takes on the most high-pitched voice Angela has ever heard from a human being and jeers, “Your dumb cat paws can’t get through the bars, can they! You and your huge whiskers blocking the way! You can’t even do math!”

What the hell did that have to do with anything. “Have you never seen a cat before in your life?” Angela asks him, and ignores whatever response he shoots back at her. She takes her phone out to record him. She figures Carole and Tuesday would get a kick out of this, or that brunette friend of theirs. If nothing else, she could use it to blackmail Gus. Present it as evidence that he’d provoked the tigers.

There’s a pointed cough from behind them both.

Angela freezes, shoulders coming up to her chin with her flinch at the sound, and Gus does the same, mouth still open mid-taunt.

“And who might you both be?” The person who catches them has the following: a grey turtleneck, a dirty pair of denim overalls, beat-up boots, a buzzcut, and brown eyes that are looking at Angela and Gus with clear suspicion.

Angela, slowly, feeling as though she is caught under floodlights, stops recording and slips her phone back into her pocket. Beside her, Gus is already straightening up, a placating smile on his face.

“You must be one of the zookeepers!” he exclaims. “My friend and I here have gotten lost—“

“You got lost on your way over my gate?”

Gus’s smile shrivels up and dies and he holds his hands up. To contrast, Angela buries her face in her palms, and considers the merits of prayer. This is unsalvageable. She can’t think of anything to say to lessen the blow of the oncoming catastrophe; all she can think is, _I’m going to be tried as an adult, not as a child,_ and, _I hope Katy will be willing to visit me in jail._

Oh, God, Katy. She was so excited when Angela told her she was going on tour with Carole and Tuesday. She’d even helped Angela pack! She’d reassured Angela when she had second thoughts about the tour. She’s going to be so _upset_ when Angela shows up on national television, getting arrested alongside a man in a camo parka and ratty jeans and oh, no, oh, no, Angela can’t _stand_ the thought.

“It’s not what it looks like,” Gus starts.

Angela lifts her head to look at him, incredulous. _Really?_ she wants to say to him and his utter _gall,_ but her jaw feels welded shut in her mortification.

The zookeeper cuts him off, their suspicious look escalating into a fully-fledged glare. “It looks like you saw my gates were closed and disregarded my privacy and _broke in._ ”

“We don’t mean to harm any of your animals, or steal something! We’re just looking for someone—“

“Who?”

“Aur—Aurelia St. Claire!” Gus tries for a smile again. “The famous songwriter, perhaps you’ve heard of them?”

The zookeeper pauses and, after a moment where Angela wildly wonders what a citizen’s arrest entails and whether or not this person was going to conduct one, gives him a smile that drips with sarcasm. They make their way past him to the entrance of the enclosure, open its gate wide, and squat, beckoning the tigers towards them.

Angela takes a good, healthy step back.

“You could say I’ve heard of them,” says the zookeeper(?), and before Gus can begin his explanation, continues, “I _am_ them.” Aurelia St. Claire(!) straightens up, smoothing a hand over the head of one of the tigers.

Which brings us to Angela and Gus, running for their lives, a pair of White Tigers in hot pursuit.

“You have the negotiation skills of a sewer rat,” Angela gasps, turning a corner. St. Claire had yelled _don’t worry, they’re trained not to kill_ at them as they began running away, but Angela is still wary of the sharp teeth and sharp claws and! If she makes it back to the hotel alive, she is going to spend the rest of her life with a heightened sense of respect for Carole and Tuesday for putting up with Gus on a regular basis.

Gus turns his head to yell back at her, “It’s not _my_ fault they didn’t let me finish explaining!”

Angela’s eyes go wide. “Face forward!” she screams at him, but she’s too late.

Gus splits his lip on a streetlamp he runs into full tilt. Angela watches every single second of it in slow-motion. It’s poetic. It’s a travesty. It’s an exercise in hubris. She feels a visceral, misplaced regret at not having captured the moment on film. The impact, the pained grunt, the forward momentum carrying the rest of his body into the crash; Gus manages to make something as slapstick as running into a pole a full-budget dramatic production.

Angela skids to an ungraceful halt and, as the tigers circle her and Gus’s (probably) dead body, wonders what she did to deserve this. 

* * *

The elevator door shuts in front of Angela and Gus with a soft, cheerful _ding._

“Listen, Angela,” Gus says, turning to face her, “I’m honestly sorry the day ended the way it did.”

Angela side-eyes him. “You mean with you almost breaking your nose and St. Claire calling off their tigers out of pity.”

“Yes, exactly,” Gus says, deadpan. “Shockingly, I didn’t plan on running into that streetlamp. Look, things got out of hand, and I’m sorry I freaked you out.”

“I didn’t freak out,” denies Angela, the taste of the mint chocolate chip ice cream St. Claire gave her to calm her down after Gus had wiped out still fresh on her tongue. She faces him with a half-hearted glare. “And we did get St. Claire in the end.” After a good deal of blubbering. On Gus’s part, of course. Angela had, in her distress, told St. Claire what she and Gus were doing lurking about their property, leading to St. Claire's apology and a _maybe_ to helping Carole and Tuesday. 

“We did, didn’t we,” says Gus, and laughs, patting Angela on the back. “All thanks to the great detective over here! Might be your true calling; ever considered looking into becoming a private eye?”

“I’m going to look into giving you a black eye,” Angela informs him, and he snorts, hands in the air once more. This is making the record for longest elevator ride of Angela's life. Just when she starts genuinely worrying the elevator got stuck while she and Gus were talking, the doors open with a _ding!_ on the twelfth floor.

“Ah, here we are,” Angela smooths her hands down her slacks, stepping out with Gus. “If you let me tell everyone at dinner you ran into a streetlamp, I’ll let you off the hook.”

“That’s a bad deal,” Gus says, rolling his eyes. “And you _did_ have fun at some point, didn’t you?”

Angela _had_ had fun, shucking off her regular responsibilities for a day, eating a restaurant’s whole menu, petting those White Tigers's fur; she’d even felt a sense of triumph when St. Claire had said they might turn up to assist Carole and Tuesday with songwriting. “Certainly not when we were getting chased by those tigers,” she says.

Gus laughs. “Oh, I saw you petting them. I was convinced you were going to try to buy them off St. Claire.”

“Please, I was too busy worrying about having to foot your hospital bills,” scoffs Angela. “Fine, I admit I had fun at _some_ point today. So do I get to tell the others what happened to you? Hard to explain away the bruise running down your face right now, besides.”

“Yes, thank you for that reminder,” Gus says, flatly. “I know you were going to show that video you took of me with the tigers to Carole and Tuesday anyway, brat.”

“You’re correct.”

They part ways at their respective rooms to freshen up for dinner. Angela sighs, shuts her door, and flops down on her bed, giving herself a moment before changing.

Before she’d left for the tour, she’d been worried out of her mind about it. She packed, unpacked, checked the Marsian Maps for each place she would stop at no less than ten times each, constantly worried whether Carole and Tuesday had changed their mind about wanting Angela to come along. Katy had helped her calm down when she said, in a moment of doubt, that if the tour went badly at any point, she’d never go on another for the rest of her life.

“It’s your first time doing something like this, isn’t it?” Katy had said. “Something is _bound_ to go wrong at some point, but it isn’t going to be _life-ruining,_ Angela. You’re stronger than that. You’ll pull through.”

Getting chased by tigers _definitely_ wasn’t on her itinerary, but Angela had survived it, and whatever else happened to her on the rest of the tour, she would survive, too.

No more field-trips with Gus, though, that was for certain.

**Author's Note:**

> written for the 2020 Voices From Mars zine! check it out here: https://caroleandtuesdayzine. tumblr. com ! it went up for a second round of orders, available till feb 28. have a good day <3!


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